Random TV Show Thoughts

[Doctor Cringelord]

Occasionally I've seen movies that have a special guest star. I'm with Crow T. Robot on this... how can you have a guest star in a movie?

Pumaman had a “guest star” listed. I never got that. I wonder if it had originally been intended as a TV movie or pilot episode

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

Early Edition was a show with a cool premise. It was also the first time I saw Fisher Stevens playing his own race, which suddenly made the Short Circuit films cringey as hell. I literally thought he was an actual Indian actor before that. Like, there were no actual Indian actors available for that role? Or if they liked him so much, they couldn’t just make the Stevens character a nerdy white guy?

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

God this show blew so hard.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

This was a classic tv moment

 

[Totenkindly]

Game of Thrones Prequel House of the Dragon Begins Production: See Photos of Matt Smith & Co. at Table Read

Yeah, looks like this is gearing up.

Honestly, I'm kind of done and am not getting in on the ground floor, after the debacle of the last two seasons of GoT. I don't much care any more, and I don't care about Targaryans nor dragons either. Talk about rehashing stuff that we don't need to rehash, as a prequel nonetheless. Their other series sounded far more interesting, in learning how the original mess started. Maybe once it airs, depending on reviews, I will take a look; but right now, who cares.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Game of Thrones Prequel House of the Dragon Begins Production: See Photos of Matt Smith & Co. at Table Read

Yeah, looks like this is gearing up.

Honestly, I'm kind of done and am not getting in on the ground floor, after the debacle of the last two seasons of GoT. I don't much care any more, and I don't care about Targaryans nor dragons either. Talk about rehashing stuff that we don't need to rehash, as a prequel nonetheless. Their other series sounded far more interesting, in learning how the original mess started. Maybe once it airs, depending on reviews, I will take a look; but right now, who cares.

I don't care much about it either. I'd just rather have the Winds of Winter, honestly.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

please not another GoT show that will be the only thing anyone ever talks about at work.

 

[Totenkindly]

I don't care much about it either. I'd just rather have the Winds of Winter, honestly.

The odds of that get slimmer day by day.

I think he wrote himself into a convoluted corner, doesn't want to cut corners, and with the show revealing some of his endings, his impetus to finish it dwindled as well.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

The odds of that get slimmer day by day.

I think he wrote himself into a convoluted corner, doesn't want to cut corners, and with the show revealing some of his endings, his impetus to finish it dwindled as well.

He seems to be interested in doing pretty much anything else but that, it seems.

 

[Totenkindly]

He seems to be interested in doing pretty much anything else but that, it seems.

yeah, seriously. He's always got ten irons in the fire, he's probably more excited with starting projects than finishing them.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

yeah, seriously. He's always got ten irons in the fire, he's probably more excited with starting projects than finishing them.

You know, if that other prequel followed the timeline of the lore in the books, it would have taken place in a Bronze Age setting very different than GOT. The First Men, ancestors of the Wildings and the Starks, were able to defeat the Children of the Forest because they had bronze weapons. I'll bet some executive saw that and complained because there were no knights or castles. "People won't watch this without medieval stuff!"

Which is too bad, because now that I think about, the show would have probably have had a pretty unique look and feel. I can't think of anything I've seen set in the Bronze Age of "Northern Europe." (I don't think we even know as much about it historically/archaeologically.) I just know of stuff like Troy and the Ten Commandments and so forth.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

It’s too bad because usually the best shows take an original or less used premise or setting and this is a big part of their popularity. Sure there’s a greater risk, but for all we know, a bronze aged epic could become the next big thing. Then we’d be seeing a bunch of rip off series and movies in similar settings and TV execs would be saying “knights are old hat. Pitch more Bronze Age stuff!”

I guess the closest thing I can think in popular culture that’s set in a vaguely Bronze Age European setting would be Conan The Barbarian?

And maybe some other sword and sandal films, though a lot of them tend to borrow from multiple eras, with people dressed in knight armor along side people who look more out of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

 

[Totenkindly]

It’s too bad because usually the best shows take an original or less used premise or setting and this is a big part of their popularity. Sure there’s a greater risk, but for all we know, a bronze aged epic could become the next big thing. Then we’d be seeing a bunch of rip off series and movies in similar settings and TV execs would be saying “knights are old hat. Pitch more Bronze Age stuff!”

I guess the closest thing I can think in popular culture that’s set in a vaguely Bronze Age European setting would be Conan The Barbarian?

And maybe some other sword and sandal films, though a lot of them tend to borrow from multiple eras, with people dressed in knight armor along side people who look more out of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

Last year it was "The Witcher." But I guess that was a video game property or something?

Recently it's been the "bad superheroes" schtick. Basically with the MCU making so much money, Amazon came up with doing "The Boys" (take from a graphic novel/comic series) as their twist on superheroes. Now suddenly this year, "Invincible" is out (weirdly Seth Rogan was involved as a producer both with The Boys and Invincible), and then there's some series about a family of heroes shoddy relationships coming out soon.

There have always been "B series" hero shows out there ever since the MCU/DCU took off, but the dysfunctional hero bit is the new phase. Hancock was about 12 years too early or something.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

It’s too bad because usually the best shows take an original or less used premise or setting and this is a big part of their popularity. Sure there’s a greater risk, but for all we know, a bronze aged epic could become the next big thing. Then we’d be seeing a bunch of rip off series and movies in similar settings and TV execs would be saying “knights are old hat. Pitch more Bronze Age stuff!”

I guess the closest thing I can think in popular culture that’s set in a vaguely Bronze Age European setting would be Conan The Barbarian?

Or Ator, which already has the incest!

 

[Totenkindly]

Season finale (episode 8) of Invincible was great. I think overall, then, the best episodes of the season were 1, 7, and 8 hands down.

Also by the end of the season, I think the actors got a better sense of how to play their characters and started directing themselves better. I think the voice work is more nuanced, rather than flat as it began.

These last two episodes are brutal and devastating, it was hard sometimes to watch if that can be believed for an animated show. It takes the idea of a bad Superman to its max, far more than we've seen in other properties, and digs into why and how easy it is for someone like that to distance themselves from humanity. It makes "The Boys" look like teddy bear tea time. Invincible just didn't shy away. There were moments where I imagined a really bad visual outcome, then thought they would opt for a nicer route, but no, they took it where I expected it to go. EDIT: I need to stress it was pretty awful, if you have a week stomach. it's exactly what a maniac like Nolan would do to "prove his point" and it is highly effective at proving his point (well, aside from it still not really changing Mark's mind), but damn it is cold and awful and worse than anything on The Boys, which so far is the only equivalent superhero show on TV.

But there's actually some real drama here, on a more adult level. No real clue what's up with Nolan now or where the rest of the series is going.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

veggie tales is weird. I wonder if vegetables go to heaven. Did Terry Schiavo go to heaven?


Too soon?

 

[Totenkindly]

veggie tales is weird. I wonder if vegetables go to heaven. Did Terry Schiavo go to heaven? Too soon?

lol, what's it been anyway -- 26 years or something? I'm losing track. Remember when that used to be the extent of "crazy" in Florida?


I was a big fan of VeggieTales when it first came out. Within evangelical Christianity, it actually tried to be creative, stretch some boundaries, and obviously the creators flew their geek flags and were pulling Monty Python references and similar out of their butts. I really liked the Silly Songs.

Then of course what happened is that they got too big, so then the non-creative elements of evangelicalism took too much notice and the company had too much hinging on their success since they had expanded. When you're small and hungry and only have a niche audience, you can do what you want; now they were dependent on too much mainstream evangelicalism. So their work got less edgy, less funny, and more stilted, and more pre-digested. They also got ahead of themselves, thought they were literally building the next Disney empire.... and bombed their big feature film they were betting the farm on. They ended up needing to get purchased out by another company, but they seemed to have lost their edge in the process and became pretty predictable to ensure a steady stream of revenue.

 

[Totenkindly]

'Simpsons' Writer John Swartzwelder Gives First Major Interview | Hollywood Reporter

 

[Totenkindly]

Of course Lisa from "Six Feet Under" would be an anti-vaxxer. (Back in 2002-3).

Getting to the mid-point of this run. John Teti did some really beautiful writeups of each episode, some years after it ran. If you're a fan of the show, they are worth reading.

Here's the pilot writeup:
Six Feet Under: "Pilot"

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

I really dislike those “behind the episode” bits that air after some TV shows now. They never actually say anything interesting or revealing like how a special effect was done, or how a scene was shot. It’s almost always some dipshit producer/show runner telling us exactly what we just saw. “X character is upset because Y character took their last can of pringles, so they decide they’re gonna get even.”

Yes, we know, we just watched the episode.